Bruce Hornsby Shares The Backstory Of His Grateful Dead Tenure

Bruce Hornsby recently joined YouTuber and musician Rick Beato for an interview. The conversation saw the acclaimed pianist/multi-instrumentalist talking about how he came to play with the Grateful Dead.

While Hornsby officially joined the Grateful Dead in 1990 following the death of GD keyboardist Brent Mydland, his band began opening select shows for the Dead in the late 1980s. As he explained on Rick Beato’s show, the Grateful Dead were fans of Bruce’s music, which he partially attributed to The Range’s version of the GD staple cover “I Know You Rider.”

“And we would take our song ‘Red Plains’ from the first record, maybe my favorite song on that record, the last one. We would take that and then double time it like they used to do with ‘China Cat Sunflower’ into ‘I Know Your Rider.’ Take it into that. So I guess the Dead heard that there was this band riding around, kind of riding high, and was doing ‘I Know You Rider.’ They got interested and became fans. And so we got this call out of the blue.”

That call led to Bruce Hornsby and The Range supporting the Dead at select shows, with Bruce often joining the Dead onstage as a special guest. Hornsby was well-versed in the Grateful Dead’s catalog as his brother Bobby was a big fan of the band. The siblings teamed up to form a Grateful Dead cover band early in their music careers.

With Brent Mydland’s passing in 1990, Bruce seemed the obvious choice to step in, so obvious that he ran into a fan a few hours after Brent’s death who had heard the notion of Bruce joining the Grateful Dead.

“I’m in Seattle and I get a call at 4 or 5 in the morning from my production manager Steve Bour and [he] said ‘just letting you know Brent died about three hours ago.’ So wow. Okay. So I tried to go back to sleep. I knew I had to get up early because I was going to do one of those morning zoo idiocies, you know. ‘Hey, Bruce, we got a trumpet over here. Why don’t you play a little bit, you know?’

“So, I get up to do that. I’m walking down the street about 7:30 because the radio station’s pretty adjacent to the hotel. Walking down the street, guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Bruce, you joining the boys?’ The word was already out.”

Bruce went on to describe the whirlwind fashion of his joining of the Grateful Dead alongside keyboardist Vince Welnick. Bruce’s first official show with the Dead took place at Madison Square Garden, followed by over 100 performances with the legendary band. Hornsby and GD guitarist Jerry Garcia had a special bond. Bruce remarked during the interview: “As Garcia said, ‘we don’t let just anybody sit in with us on accordion.'”

Watch the Grateful Dead segment below and scroll on to watch the full Rick Beato interview: